Ok, so I'm sure many of you know about this thing called a Side Deck. But what I'm not sure about is if you know how to use it. Here I will teach you what a Side Deck is and how you can use it.

What is a Side Deck?

A Side Deck is a pool of 0 to 15 cards that you can put into your deck in between games of a Match. To put a card(s) in, you must take the same number of card(s) OUT. That means if you have 40 in your Main Deck, and you side in 3 cards, you have to take out 3 cards so that you still have 40.

Some rules of thumb regarding the Side Deck:

Recognize that no matter what deck you are running, you WILL want a 15-card Side deck.

Depending on what deck you are running, there may be some good side cards that conflict with your deck's strategy. NEVER side those cards.

Out of the cards you CAN side, choose some that work against many decks, and choose others that work against your bad matchups. If you're playing a popular deck, plan for the mirror match.

Most of your side deck should cover ONLY your bad matchups. If there are cards that work well against many decks, and the deck you want to counter is on the list of decks that card counters, use it before anything else, UNLESS the card doesn't do as good a job as more specific cards.

Now what is Teching?Teching is maining a side card that is considered a semi-staple due to its ablility to counter most of the meta. If you don't know what "Meta" means, get out (lol jk). Follow the rules of side-decking when using techs.

To conclude this lesson, I would like to give you a list of generic side cards for the September 2013 format:

Just asking, how do you get these cards? How do you even know what your looking for? I guess you've been playing yugioh long time or been looking up cards and learning. Nonetheless, this is a brilliant article, I'll be sure to use it. Thx buddy.

darkphoenix wrote:Just asking, how do you get these cards? How do you even know what your looking for? I guess you've been playing yugioh long time or been looking up cards and learning. Nonetheless, this is a brilliant article, I'll be sure to use it. Thx buddy.

No problem! And as a matter of fact, I've been playing YGO since Phantom Darkness was released.